00:00Josh and Raina won't answer the door either.
00:02What about Carson? Sadie asked.
00:05He's drawing, Alan said.
00:07Kyla and Jasmine were watching him through the window when I walked past their house.
00:10He's got a box of yellow crayons.
00:12He's drawing boxes, Sadie.
00:14Hundreds of them, all over the wallpaper behind his bed.
00:18A cold spike of dread drove down her spine.
00:22We need to see the shore.
00:26They rode two miles west, past the perimeter fences where the grass had turned the color of bone.
00:31The closer they got to Fern Ridge, the choir grew heavier.
00:35No crickets, no tree frogs.
00:37Even the red-winged blackbirds that usually nest in the cactails were gone.
00:43When they reached the edge of the lake bed near the dam, the water was gone,
00:46withdrawn hundreds of yards into a narrow, stagnant channel in the middle of the basin.
00:50What was left was an expanse of cracked black silt.
00:53Studded with rusted tire rims, sunken lot chairs, and thousands of dead bullheads stiffening in the mud.
00:59And in the center of the bed, where the deepest water used to be, something was stuck in the silt.
01:04It wasn't a saucer.
01:06It wasn't a craft with rivets or windows or engines.
01:09It was an angled slab of dark, unpolished material, 50 feet long,
01:13leaning out of the mire at a 40-degree angle like a broken headstone.
01:17And there's Khurchy.
01:20You
